“Tight storytelling” is a writing buzzword that I use a lot but have difficulty actually defining, so today I’m challenging myself to do so. A tight story, in my mind, is one that feels efficient – no time is wasted on sideplots or other developments that don’t directly serve the main storyline. This doesn’t necessarily mean a completely straight shot from beginning to end, but it definitely excludes the sprawling, twisting threads of most webcomics I can think of.

Western culture has an odd veneration for royalty. Our fairy tales and fantasies are full of Good Kings, Wise Kings, and Fated Kings, while Disney has made fortunes upon fortunes churning out fictional princesses for us to adore. It’s a romanticism that seems incongruous with the bloody true history of such things. So if there’s one thing I appreciate about Kill Six Billion Demons, it’s that it never shies away from laying bare the fundamental essence of royalty: violence.

Last week Almost a damn month ago I talked about “fantasy soup”, a grab-bag of a genre that combines various genre tropes and wild imagination to create something truly weird. I also talked about how that genre as we knew it in the Webcomic Wild West of 1999-2005 has all but died out, a product of an environment, ideally suited to it, that has simply ceased to be.